Supplyant

I’m a firm believer that when it comes to e-commerce sites, its wrong to go too far away from what customers are used to. Every 3 months I take a look at the tools, features and styles that the top e-commerce setups are using to woo customers. My snapshot takes a look at some of my favorite shops and shops that consistently feature well in hotlists.

Who are we looking at?
Ebuyer | Asos | Argos | Boden | B&Q | MyDeco | Apple | Tesco | Ebay | Amazon | John Lewis

1. Layout

Its appears to be true that there is now a way e-commerce should look and feel. There are standardised design elements throughout big brand e-commerce

The Header

Consistently menus now reside on the top, with logo on the left, search & shopping basket on the right.

Home Page

Always featuring a big picture of some kind, normally full width with no side navigation

Category Pages

Sidebars to narrow searches are commonplace and getting more intelligent.

Products – full width

Once you get to a products page its now mostly full width, with no side navigation, and heavily product focused above the fold.

2.  Video

Video is a trend that seems to be cropping up regularly and I love it! Video provides masses of extra emotion and trust on any product it appears on. For me the best use of this is at ASOS, fantastically emotional salesmanship on the kids cloths and great runway videos for the products in adult fashion. Its also in use at  Ebuyer with selected lines giving QVC style buying guides. Do your videos have to be flawless to get a response? If you take a look at this youtube clip of somebody unboxing his new ipod with over 650,000 views you’ll see that real user videos are also a massively powerful customer conversion tool.

3. Quality of photography

If your retailing online and want to roll with the big guys there no excuse for an under exposed 50×50 jpg anymore.

I see a few consistencies from my chosen retailers:

• Giant images are OK for homepages (see examples below)
• Branded commodity items image quality isn’t so important (have a look at Argos, Tesco and John Lewis sites for examples of this)
• Providing more that 1 image if possible is most definitely better
• Modern e-commerce layouts absolutely place focus on product shots
• At each of the sites I looked at there was no genuinely poor images.
• On a number of sites I saw standard product images teamed up with “in use” pictures with people in them

4. Search tools

Search results on all the sites I looked at were pretty good. I loved the search on ebuyer, it was intuitive and helpful. Apples search was awesome, extremely polished I’d recommend you try it.

Second stage filtering of search results was an absolute requirement for all stores for me mydeco ruled on this one, the colour chooser was a nice touch. Despite Apple having a great search it was one of the few stores were I didn’t feel a need to search as the navigation was incredibly clear.

5. Delivery

A constant frustration for me with online shopping is poor delivery information. I started out in Automotive parts and its shocking how poor many of  the distributors of these parts are compared to leading online shops.

ebuyer and asos stood out as excellent examples of going above and beyond for customers.

• Ebuyer offers next day delivery on orders up to 11.00 at night. WOW!
• ASOS offers same day delivery in London. WOW
• Zappos in America stood out with its free delivery both ways promise

2 consistent elements cropped up.

• Free delivery is commonplace (and so it should be, it removes all confusion)
• Delivery on a nominated day is gaining traction

Conclusion

If there is one thing that’s clear above all else is that the strength of modern platforms means its all about high quality content. Many of the sites I used looked and functioned in pretty much the same manner.

Selling online now is more about the determining why somebody should buy it from you. Is it the quality of the service, the great video help, the  awesome delivery or something else.

I wouldn’t use any of the companies because they have a great site, but because they are great companies. Good sites are just a  tool to that may provide enough extras to push customers in your direction rather than some other retailer.

If you have favorite sites you think I should be checking in on I’d love to hear them.

I would guess not. I would guess that nobody has been brave enough to try. It doesnt stop people trying to sell to two sets of fanatical fans online in the same place though.

The joys of modern e-commerce platforms allow you to target you customers very nicely by setting up specialist sites pitched at very tight knit groups of customers. As far as the internet is concerned your chances are better as the master of one trade and not the jack of all.

There are some key advantages to this method:

• You can use language on the site that empathises with your target customers needs
• Adwords are generally cheaper and link building is easier at the niche level
• The appearance of a store devoted to a particular thing builds confidence
• Finding the right products is much easier for the customer

The net result of this is an improved sales conversion rate.

Ill give you an example of  how we work in the world of Motorsport Clothing.  It will give you a taste of how you can apply this process to product highly targeted specialist sites.  Using this process can help to give you improved conversions.

The Motorsport Clothing Network.

OutletF1
A site specialising in end of season f1 merchandise
It gets promoted once a year – at the end of season, for bargain hunters looking for a great deal. Visit outletf1

Ford Rally Clothing
Rally fans are a very partisan bunch, they love the teams and more importantly the drivers. By devoting an entire site to the teamthe products they want are easy to find and cross promotion becomes easier. Visit Ford Rally Clothing

Mclarenf1
Mclaren is a very British affair this year with two British world champions leading the way. Based on takes full opportunity of the xenophobic tendencies of its supporters. The product descriptions have been written by a genuine Mclaren fan helping to build trust. Visit Mclaren Clothing

Williams F1 Clothing

Aston Martin Clothing
A super desirable brand with a site designed to highlight the emotions associated with owning a piece of a supercar legend. Visit Aston Martin clothing

I was speaking to somebody the other day about the pro’s and cons of particular couriers.  I gave my opinion on a courier called Home Delivery Network. I thought might be a good fit for the products they were shipping as they had a reputation for low delivery damage.

At the next meeting I was told  “we’ve done some research online and found out that HDNL are rubbish”

I searched for “Home Delivery Network Reviews” and came up with this truly awful review.

So I use DHL for our internal deliveries… how did they fare?

So what about ParcelForce the preferred carrier of the person I was speaking to.

So were do we go from here.

Management of online reviews is set to become a hot topic in the next few years.  Strong brands can get away with bad reviews to a certain extent, but a bad review can signal the death of a weak product or service.

Equally as a consumer, to state the obvious,  make sure you look at similar products before jumping to bad review conclusions.

As the saying goes “Everybody shouts if your drains smell but nobody takes the time to tell you your drains smell great”

Whats the best review you have ever seen?

One of my greatest pleasures is seeing my clients get a result from online marketing. Coaching them in how to follow marketing strategies which work is fulfilling.  I am lucky enough to help people do this every single day and it feels great.

I am going to be helping a bunch more people in the new year as I am speaking at the eBootcamp event on February 25th.  You could be one of those people.

If you know you want to do more business online but feel ill equipped to make it happen this course is tailor made for you.

If your business has more than 5 staff then Business Link has made funding available, up to £1000.

e-Bootcamp – Leading your business online


This is not a conference. It’s an in-depth, fast-paced, training seminar designed to give you the tools you need to move to the next level. Full of candid, no-holds-barred content from experts in online business, you will walk away empowered to use your website for real business.
e-bootcamp.co.uk

As a special treat if you use the promotional code SUPP1 when you contact the bootcamp team and book  you will receive 3 books from my favourite online marketing guru Seth  Godin.

• Seth Godin: The Dip
• Seth Godin: Permission Marketing
• Seth Godin: Tribes

Give me a call or email me and I’ll be happy to give you more details.

I purchased some new speakers at the weekend. I really really like the ebuyer.com site and its one of my favourite places to buy online.

Along with sites like Play.com, ASOS.com, MyDeco and more recently Argos they provide a  real source of inspiration and ideas.

These sites are first on my list when it comes to best practice in e-commerce and looking at which features need adding to our own e-commerce platform.

As I ordered I saw a few interesting things:

A fantastically well written review

I always check countless reviews before purchasing. In this case every single review was a 5 star (all 176 of them). The best review I saw contained the words.

There’s only 2 things that should make a man cry. The first being seeing your first child being born, the second being the moment you plug these speakers in and turn on the music.

This sort of phrase is something you just dont get in fake reviews, and filled me with enormous confidence in my purchase.

If you buy something and you love it always right a review… Its great karma.

Uber Delivery

Order up until 11pm for next day delivery, that is an incredible service.  I pretty sure that delivery flexibility is going to play and increasing part in the e-commerce wars. Look no further than ASOS who recently announced a same day delivery service to customers in London.

Buyer Remorse?

When I purchased the set they showed only 1 set left in stock. The moment I ordered they didn’t go out of stock, in fact the price went up by £70 and showed over 200 in stock.

I guessed that one of two things must have happened, which are both great tactics.

1.When they run out of stock they move to a drop shipping setup where a wholesaler ships on there behalf

2.Is this a very clever tool for removing buyers remorse? 

Buyer’s remorse is an emotional condition whereby a person feels remorse or regret after a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of higher value items which could be considered unnecessary although it may also stem from a sense of not wishing to be “wrong”. (wikipedia)

All of a sudden I haven’t brought something expensive, but got a bargain. This is not a tactic I have seen before but may be one worth considering.

They turned up undamaged & ontime

This simple fact is enough to keep me coming back to Ebuyer again.

What do you think the best tools are for combating buyers remorse?

Louis Vuitton is on a mission. It has singled itself out as the spearhead of campaign to manage its brand online, and the largely un-regulated search engines are its enemy.

Louis Vuitton has a  problem with the google adwords results. They hate the fact that google is profiting from allowing people to use the Louis Vuitton brand name in adwords. They also feel that Google is profiting from giving people who infringe trademarks, with fakes, the ability to promote.

Google generates $21 Billion a year from adwords so as you can guess they dont really want to change anything unless they have to.

What you will notice is that the words Louis Vuitton doesnt appear in the title. As you can see there are plenty of way to circumvent that if you need to.

Unfortunately for Louis Vuitton the European Court of Justice has ruled against them, so its business as usual. This issue is far from dead though with appeals already in place.

If you need help with working these methods into your adwords contact us today

Something that happened to me that really singled zappos as  a cool company.  My brother Nick was talking on Seesmic, a video blog site,  about company culture. During that conversation he was contacted by a guy called Tony who offered to send a copy of his companies culture statement to see if it would help.

Two days later all the way from the states arrived a really cool 200+ page book signed by Tony Hsieh of Zappos featuring each and every one of the employees at the company, telling the readers what they thought of it. Nick wasn’t going to buy anything from them in the states, it was just a really cool thing to receive.

Zappos has just sold to Amazon for a staggering $900 million.

Some cool zappos facts:

• Zappos.com has more than 10 million customers.
• 75% of business is repeat customers
• They uniquely offer free shipping both ways (if something goes wrong, dont worry we’ll pick it up)
• CEO Tony Hsieh receives about 2,000 e-mails a day.
• Tony now has 1,039,695 followers on twitter

The things I find interesting are:

• The site isn’t “flashy” but “functional”
• Everything is geared around exceptional service, nothing to do with the web
• The zappos culture is right in front, its preached on every page
• They have made a point of being open, embracing social media like twitter and facebook.

And why did amazon buy them?

• Zappos is growing quickly and shows no signs of stopping
• Zappos culture that has been fundamental in its  success. Amazon will love learning from this
• Zappos has great customer service.  Associating with this is great.
• Zappos has grown a group of amazing people. From its leaders to the post guy they are unified.

I read a great post over at practicalecommerce.com which looked at what leading money saving words that people use when searching google. It really indicates beautifully what consumers are looking for when trying to save a few pennies.

The report was obviously weighted towards America as the word coupon was the most searched for phrase over discount, sale and free shipping.

So In the UK we substituted those words with more UK centric words.

SALE v DISCOUNT v CHEAP v FREE DELIVERY v VOUCHER

There is one big trend here. More people are looking for sales and less are looking for cheap. Surprisingly thought this fits in with the normal marketing rules during a recession. A prime reason for purchasing better products in a recession is that they are less likely to go wrong, break or be of poor quality.

Reliability is a highly prized virtue at the moment and branded items on sale offer a percieved better value than cheap products.

Another indicator of this is the rise in popularity of big brand shops on the Internet.  Consumers have to feel safe in the knowledge that  the company they are buying from will last as long as the item they purchase.

FREE DELIVERY v NEXT DAY DELIVERY v SATURDAY DELIVERY

More people are looking for free delivery than next day delivery and its growing at a huge rate. In fact searches for free delivery at Christmas were a massive 80% higher than next day delivery.  Looking at the same report for Free Delivery vs Low Price its the same situation.

So what do I do?

In the minds of consumers

• putting themselves out waiting for a delivery is OK as long as its cheaper
• cheap products are not OK
• consumers are not prepared to risk  money with an unsafe retailer.

The numbers would indicate that a free delivery option is a winner, even if you offer an extended delivery option for free.

If you dont you may be missing valuable traffic.

In pre internet days if you upset a customer then they simply didn’t come back to you.

In the worse case scenario they might tell a few  friends that they didn’t like how they were dealt with. It was easy to get somebody in, piss them off and not care about it, as there was a constant stream of new leads.

Things have changed!

The modern, web savvy, shopper is a well informed and dangerous animal, especially if you upset them. No matter if you’re a small local shop or a worldwide retailer your customers have a mountain of weapons in their arsenal to discredit you and your business.

• The customers claims may be completely incorrect
• They may have made their own mistakes
• You have dealt with their issues in accordance with all the best practice rules.
• If you are a manufacturer, be aware that mail order sales have 7 days grace, where products can be returned for no reason.

It doesn’t matter who’s wrong, a customer like this can do far more damage to your brand than the price of the order

Just take a look at this disgruntled customer. He was so angry that he patiently sat and made a video about his bad experiences.

Reviews sites, Forums, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube offer them a lot of options. In most cases you won’t have a right to reply.

Your Weapons

Unless you really are offering bad service, all is not lost. In most cases the reviewer is alone, they may have hit every social network they can find but they are normally still alone.

1. Your biggest weapon is your existing happy customers.  If you can persuade them to start writing publicly available reviews, you’re onto a winner. 1 bad review and 20 good reviews and  30 glowing  reviews is more likely to win you a customer than 30 glowing reviews, it looks more real…
2. Do a quick Google search for “your company” reviews , look for bad reviews. If the complaint is unfounded some sites will give you the option to reply. If you can’t respond, get onto your friends, family and everybody else you know to get some responses back in there quick.
3. Don’t all respond from the same office – most sites will look at your ip address when you post to check you’re not spamming them.
4. Speak to the customer concerned, what can you do to change his  mind?

The ultimate weapon, go above and beyond normal service levels and turn an upset customer into somebody who actively tells people how you solved the issue.

Do you have any other great tactics?

Everybody has favourite websites; sites you use, recommend and admire. I never look for inspiration from sites in my own market, but for leaders in other markets. That’s the only way you can innovate.

In my eyes ASOS stand out clearly as a company using a common sense, planned approach to rapid growth. ASOS’s recent annual report, gives a great insight into what a rapidly growing online trader is looking towards to maintain this growth.

The headline figures:

• Turnover: £81 million to £165 million
• Profit: £37 million  to £71 million
• International Sales: up 303% to £32 million

The full report is here

The ASOS story – ecommerce by numbers

Find a niche
ASOS (As Seen On Screen) began life imitating celebrity fashions. Seen a handbag posh spice  is wearing in a magazine? ASOS will sell you a handbag in the style of posh.

Grow the customer base
By doing a great job, customers used them often and recommended them to their friends, building a loyal bunch of fans.

Brand Extension
ASOS then launch into men’s, designer labels and kids

Overseas
The UK is a small place, lets take on the world.

What’s next for ASOS?

Delivery
Improved delivery has been identified as a big mover in increasing conversion rates. So much so that a same day delivery service is being launched.

Social Media
Growing the blog, Facebook, Twitter and Bebo channels are a fundamental part of the strategy. Building a community of people who love clothes and love talking to each other about clothes.

Overseas
A weak pound and economies of scale with delivery allow massive growth opportunities

More own brand
Now they have built a strong brand with a great identity it’s time to leverage it.

The lesson

It’s easy to look at your own competitors and copy them, but it will be time consuming and expensive to build a brand by doing this. ASOS didn’t start out saying “We want to be like Next”  they had a clear identity and worked it.

If you must copy somebody, look to leaders in other markets and take the best they have to offer. It’s a better way to retain a clear identity.